We’ve often met lawyers who were ignoring or actively avoiding social media marketing. Because there was no way to measure it’s effectiveness. Sure you can use Google Analytics to record your replies, shares, likes and clicks — but how much of this engagement is converting into paying clients? The guesswork just wasn’t worth risking the time and budget necessary to maintaining a social media campaign.
We here at Kirkpatrick Creative hate guesswork. It has no place in advertising. When it came to the effectiveness of social media marketing, we immediately found an application for one our tried and true measurement techniques. If you read our first book, How to Manage Phone Directory Advertising for Efficiency and Productivity, you might remember this….
Separate Your Ad Placement and Directory Listing with Different Telephone Numbers.
Why would you want to run two numbers? To track, by telephone number, how many customers are calling based upon your paid advertisement placement, and how many are only looking you up alphabetically within the directory listings. We’ve tracked this and the data is very telling:
Yes. Tracking calls from two separate numbers is difficult. But you already worked hard to earn your money, shouldn’t you work just as hard to make sure you’re spending it efficiently? It’s time to know.
Now, since a different number is listed with your ad placement, the only people who dial from the listings number are client prospects driven to you through other media, referrals or return customers. This is a clean, telling delineation.
Sound familiar? For our Yellow Pages clients, we separate their free listings and their paid advertising with two separate phone numbers, so we know which listing a lead is responding to! Why can’t you do this with social media posts? You can!
Perhaps your marketers want to try out a new phrase in social posts? Maybe they want to test a newer, more casual voice for the firm. Maybe they simply want to test the engagement from Facebook against that from Twitter.
By setting up a separate number for each of these tests, you can know which tests are effective — and which are a waste of time and money.
Therefore at the end of each test your social media ad campaigns are smarter, leaner and more efficient. Saving the firm time and money — more leads, less money. It’s music to our ears!